24 hours to go
May 17th 2006WallabyGeneral & site news & thesis
In about 24 hours I’ll be defending my dissertation at last. Except that it isn’t supposed to be much of a “defense” at all. There are three major hurdles in my program — candidacy, in the second year, and the data meeting, about six months before defending. If they didn’t think I was basically capable of doing what I’d intended to do, they would’ve said so at the first and kicked me out. If they didn’t think I’d done what I wound up intending to do, they would’ve said so and kept me in for another year.
And so the “defense” turns out, in most cases, to be a public anyone-invited sort of talk about my work, followed by a chat with my committee about which bits of my dissertation could use a clean-up and I need to check the spacing on this section and I know it’s really “doctoral committee” on the title page and not “dissertation committee” but I’d been thinking much too long by the time I got to that bit and if I were pretending to be clever I’d say that I left that in as an obvious correction to distract them from the gaping holes in my argument on chapter 3. Oh, and what are my plans now? Except that that one’s easy, since I’m going to be working as a postdoc with someone else on my committee. I don’t even have to move.
Six and a half years of graduate school and it ends with a nice little chat? Talk about underwhelming.
Why no, that wasn’t a complaint. Not complaining at all.
Other random coolness –
* My parents are here! my parents are here! This is their first trip up to [state], or at least my mom’s; my dad flew up briefly to drive the minivan home for me when I moved.
* If I really really really want to complicate things with Cathy, there could be another Cathy around. Literally, too, not just as a generic term.
* It’s about time to overhaul this site, too, or at least upgrade WP and think about which parts I want to continue with. Probably not the Gallery section, or at least not using the current software; it’s gotten more and more complex over the past two years and I have no interest in trying to keep up. I hear WP 2 can do a pretty good mini-gallery though. And pictures are fun.